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'Tis the season to make prognostications, and last week saw a flood of thick reports from Wall Street on what to expect next year from stocks, including techs. Happily, despite their girth, the reports had pithy summaries, and they were mostly fairly sunny for technology investors.

"We think the tech sector is turning up in 2013," was portfolio strategist Barry Knapp's take at a breakfast meeting Barclays Capital held for reporters Thursday.

The folks at Merrill Lynch were bullish, too, and a bit sardonic, with chief investment guru Michael Hartnett quipping that "yieldless" bonds are "the best thing about equities right now," as they're driving investors to seek higher returns. Merrill's actual advice was to overweight technology, energy, and industrial stocks. The firm noted that the technology sector is "trading at a discount to the market for the first time in 20 years."

But there's a catch: As much as some portfolio managers want to you to buy technology stocks because of their undemanding valuations and high yields, the market for technological goods looks very uncertain.

Moskowitz is modeling 1.7% IT spending growth next year, while JPMorgan economists see GDP climbing 2.4%. To Moskowitz, this is no mere slump, but rather a long-term trend for certain products.

Personal computers, as Barron's has written frequently this year, are under assault from smartphones and tablets. And server computers, writes Moskowitz, are set to lose the sales lift they've gotten for years from the virtualization craze, now that many companies have embraced it. It's just like a drug that loses its potency over time.

That's fine, but the observation that "it's a stockpicker's market" is oft-repeated and generally not very helpful. Still, U.S. companies have more than $1.2 trillion in cash on their balance sheets, points out Nomura Equity Research software analyst Rick Sherlund. Once the U.S. gets past the fiscal cliff, some of that might be spent on IT. "The trick is to invest in the new technology that is where the spending is going," he advises.

IT WAS SOMEWHAT EXCITING, then, to see a note from Merrill's tech experts last week trumpeting the only tech investing theme you need to know, in three letters: LTE—an acronym for the "long-term evolution" technology standard.

To the extent LTE gets more and more bandwidth to those phones, and tablets, it is "an accelerator to the concept of true mobility," as they put it.

That might be true, ultimately, but first a reality check is required: "It's still going to be an incremental year" for LTE, says Craig Mathias, a principal with the Farpoint Group, a wireless consultancy.

In some densely packed urban areas, you can download Internet data at speeds up to 20 million bits per second, Mathias says. But carriers don't yet have enough LTE capacity, meaning that many phone and tablet users won't really be able to count on much more than one million to two million bits per second next year. So, adds Mathias: "We're advising makers of apps for phones and tablets not to count on the highest published LTE speeds" in designing their wares.

So, maybe we won't get the nirvana of wireless computing next year, but we'll get closer, and there should be some good business for tech companies that help us get there.

But because LTE is going to take not just next year, but many years, to build out, there will also be a greater focus on offloading traffic from cellular systems onto Wi-Fi networks. That should be a good news for Wi-Fi equipment vendor
Aruba Networks
(ARUN) and its younger competitor,
Ruckus Wireless
(RKUS).

Ruckus stock, at $20.05, has nearly doubled since it came public on Nov. 16. Ruckus now looks too pricey, trading at 5.4 times projected 2013 sales and with just 17 cents a share in profit expected next year. Last week, Goldman Sachs analyst Simona Jankowski, while praising the company's products and market, said investors who don't own the stock should hold off on buying it.

With momentum for wireless taking off, I think the estimates could go higher for Ruckus, and that the current price could end up looking like something of a bargain. However, as my colleague Jack Willoughby rightly observed in these pages just before the IPO, you might want to wait till springtime, when lock-up restrictions expire and insiders have sold whatever stock they want to dump.